A Comparative Study Of The Breadth And Depth Of Vocabulary Knowledge Between Freshland Juniors

Vocabulary knowledge, especially the breadth and depth of vocabularyknowledge plays an important role in reading comprehension. Most students are oftenslowed down because of many unknown words in English reading. So it is necessaryto know about how reading comprehension correlates with breadth and depth ofvocabulary knowledge in second language acquisition. Recently there is muchresearch done in this aspect but they chooses students from primary school, juniorhigh school, senior high school and non-English major undergraduates in vocationalcollege and university as the participants. Few focus on English majors, let alone onthe comparison between English major freshmen and juniors.This study attempts to make a comparison of breadth and depth of vocabularyknowledge between college English freshmen and juniors and to explore therelationship between breadth and depth of vocabulary knowledge and readingcomprehension. Sixty-three English major students (33freshmen and30juniors) fromJiangxi Normal University participate in this study. A background informationquestionnaire is employed to gain students’ general background information. Avocabulary levels test and the Word Association test are used to measure students’breadth and depth of vocabulary knowledge respectively. The reading comprehensiontests are administrated to assess their reading performance. SPSS is used to carry outthe Independent T-test and Pearson Correlations analyses.This study finds that both freshmen and juniors have a moderate breadth anddepth of vocabulary knowledge but juniors have a higher level of breadth and depth ofvocabulary knowledge than freshmen. Both freshmen and juniors have a betterperformance in breadth than depth. There are no significant differences in theperformance of both the2000word level and the10000word level between freshmenand juniors while significant differences exist in the performance of the3000wordlevel, the academic word level and the5000word level between freshmen and juniors.It also reveals that there are no significant differences in the performance of the threelexical categories (noun, adjective, verb) between freshmen and juniors. A positiveand significant correlation of breadth and depth and reading comprehension exist forboth freshmen and juniors. In specific, reading comprehension has a positive andsignificant relationship with the performance at the2000word level, the3000wordlevel, academic word level and10000word level while reading comprehension doesn’t correlate with the performance at the5000word level for freshmen. Readingcomprehension has a positive and significant relationship with the performance at the2000word level, the3000word level, the5000word level and10000word levelwhile reading comprehension doesn’t correlate with the performance at the academicword level for juniors.The findings call for a recognition of the importance of improving the breadthand depth of vocabulary knowledge in English major students’ learning process andarouse cause attention to the important role of breadth and depth of vocabularyknowledge in reading comprehension. It suggests the necessity to enlarge students’vocabulary size and deepen other aspects of a word such as lexical meaning,morphological and syntactical properties in addition to association. This study alsogives some implications for the further research.